Device::WebIO Family Version 0.002

2014-09-20

A little while ago, I made a tentative release of Device::WebIO. That was a basic version so I didn’t talk much about it. I’ve now finished up what I wanted for v0.002, which gets things to where I want.

Device::WebIO provides a unified API for controlling all the wonderful System on a Chip hardware that’s been coming out of late. If you wanted to control one of these devices on Perl previously, you would have used HiPi for Raspberry Pi, Firmata for Arduino, or Device::PCDuino for PCDuino. Each of these has their own API. With Device::WebIO, you use a single interface with a driver for your specific device.

The project borrows from WebIOPi, a Python project which is specific to the Raspberry Pi. What I really liked about it was the REST interface, which lets you control the pins over a web browser. But I also wanted to branch out from just the Raspberry Pi, and hey, I also prefer Perl.

So I grabbed the REST interface and implemented in Device::WebIO::Dancer. It’s mostly compatible with WebIOPi’s interface, but I made a few changes where it tended to be too specific to the Raspberry Pi. For instance, Analog-to-Digital Converters need a voltref and a bit resolution. On the Rpi (or rather, expander boards for the Rpi, since it doesn’t have an ADC pin on its own), the voltref and resolution values are the same across all pins, but that’s not true on the PCDuino. The original interface didn’t specify such a pin, so I added a pin value to the call.

All such changes are documented in the pod for the REST API.